What Will Combining Hulu and Disney+ into Single App Look Like For Users?

It’s hard not to notice how diligently Disney has been following the Warner Bros. Discovery playbook recently. From content cuts to potential licensing deals, Disney is repeating many of the steps WBD took in 2022 as it attempted to tackle billions of dollars in post-merger costs, and as it struggled to reign in losses from its streaming segment.

Disney is also dedicating considerable resources to paring down losses from its streaming platforms Disney+ and Hulu. The company reported some progress in that area in the past few months, but is still seeing its streaming arm lose hundreds of millions every quarter. The company is pulling yet another solution from the WBD brain trust to solve its issues: putting Disney+ and Hulu into a “one-app experience.”

While the company has not revealed exactly how this will work, it is believed that both Disney+ and Hulu will have tiles that allow users to easily navigate from one app to the other without having to exit the app they are currently in. If Disney was to fully merge the two streaming services, it would likely need to wait until it owned Hulu in totality. The company will be able to purchase the remaining 33% of the service from Comcast beginning in 2024. Customers will need to subscribe to both streamers to be able to bounce back and forth between them, but given all of the Disney Bundle options, that is easier and cheaper than ever.

Disney’s CEO Bob Iger indicated that this new “one-app experience” was coming during the company’s latest conference call to discuss its quarterly earnings. He called it a “logical progression” for the two services, which would bring down friction for users and lead to better audience engagement. But what will making the two services more accessible look like from a content standpoint?

New data from the streaming aggregator Reel Good is helping to answer that question. Reel Good broke down the content libraries of both streamers, giving users a detailed view of what the offerings of the “one-app experience” will look like. Disney+ and Hulu will remain distinct streaming services, but since there will be just a few taps of the finger separating their content, Reel Good’s data treats the two content libraries as one.

The new, integrated app will feature far more TV series than Disney+ ever did by itself. Hulu has 1,699 TV shows in its catalog, nearly triple the count of Disney+ at 588. There will be a good balance between prestige TV and procedural shows, as around half of the titles on the new experience will be quality or high-quality TV series — shows that have a 6.5 or higher rating with 300+ votes on IMDb.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Disney+ will contribute the lion’s share of movies to the new platform. The company’s flagship service currently offers 1,351 movies to Hulu’s 1,197. Once again, when the one-app experience rolls out to customers, it will have a nearly-even split of highly rated films (1,333) versus other films (1,202).

In total, the combined Disney+ and Hulu experience will offer more than 2,500 movies and over 2,200 TV series. By comparison, What's On Netflix has calculated Netflix’s streaming library to be somewhere in the vicinity of 6,500 titles. Disney has a ways to go before it reaches that number of shows and movies, but it will be a lot closer to Netflix’s count than it currently is once you can move a bit more freely between its two streamers.

The breakdown of genres on the new app might be surprising to some users. Animation is likely the first category of film that many users associate with Disney+, as the service houses most of the company’s best-known classics like “Snow White,” “Bambi,” and “Cinderella,” as well recent favorites such as “The Lion King,” “Encanto,” and the Pixar catalog. But action and adventure is the best-represented genre on Disney+, and will be the second-best represented behind the more general drama category once the two libraries come together in the one-app experience.

The fact that action and adventure have such a heavy presence on Disney+ is clearly a reflection of the popularity of the Marvel franchise. Disney is planning to cut back on the number of TV series from the Marvel universe going forward, with an increased focus on quality over quantity. Marvel is a big draw for Disney, but its reputation has declined in the past few years as some fans feel the franchise has struggled to regain a narrative focus after “Avengers: Endgame.”

Customers are still awaiting details from Disney as to how and when the combined streaming experience will work, but thanks to this data from ReelGood, users at least have a decent idea of what the breadth of content will look like when the streamers are more closely aligned.